Market adoption of wireless LAN (WLAN) technology has exploded, as users from a wide range of backgrounds and vertical industries have brought this technology into their homes, offices, and increasingly into the public air space. This inflection point has highlighted not only the limitations of earlier-generation systems, but also the changing role that WLAN technology now plays in people's work and lifestyles across the globe Indeed, WLANs are rapidly changing from convenience networks to business-critical networks. Increasingly users are depending on WLANs to improve the timeliness and productivity of their communications and applications, and in doing so, require greater visibility, security, management, and performance from their network.
Wireless mesh networks have become increasingly popular. A typical wireless mesh network consists of mesh access points (e.g., Cisco SkyCaptain mesh access points) and wireless clients. To construct self-forming and self-healing multi-hop wireless mesh networks, each mesh access point finds a route back to a root node. The routing protocols used by the mesh access points generally form a hierarchical routing configuration, according to which backhaul traffic is forwarded between a root node and multiple mesh access points. Wireless mesh networks can include one or more mesh access points (mesh APs or MAPs) including a backhaul radio for transmission of traffic across the mesh backhaul between other mesh nodes, and a client radio for wireless client traffic. Because the mesh backhaul carries aggregated wireless traffic from many users in the network, consumption of the backhaul bandwidth and, thus, congestion and queue overflow can occur. A variety of rate limiting an bandwidth management schemes have been employed in wired networks; however, these rate limiting technologies fail to account for some differentiating attributes of wireless mesh networks.